The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • A complicated poster.

    Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

    The Tools of Victory

    Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.
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  • War Between the Worlds, and its sequel

    I’ve been making posters that, I’ve claimed, were from the First Interworld War. I’ve decided that, “really”, they’re from the Second Interworld War. The primary motivation for the change has been the realization that most of my inspirations are from WWII, not WWI. Also, this allows me to imagine, vaguely, that H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was the First Interworld War. Here’s what I envision:

    Wells’ Martians apparently did not have radio technology. It seems a pretty big lack, but who knows? Mars does not have a Heaviside layer, I believe, so the idea of long-distance transmission by radio might not have occurred to them. Also, there are signs that Well’s Martians were telepathic. If so, and if telepathy is not easily conveyed by electromagnetic fields, then they might never have gotten into that technology. If telepathy is then also short-ranged, we’d have the situation I want; to wit, that the Martians dying on Earth are unable to relay a warning about infection to the Martians at home. Since the Martians (justifiably) probably found it inconceivable that we resist their might, they might have kept chucking one or two cylinders a year as reinforcements, not knowing at first that the war was lost and later, not knowing why.

    So, for the next decade or two, at random times spaced by a few months, these engines of death would come down on Earth. The Martian within would extricate the walking machine, lay waste to the surrounding area, but then eventually die from the same disease that brought down the first. Along the way, the powers on Earth would get valuable experience and technology battling the lander and then trying to recover it. This allows me to leapfrog tech when I need to, and explains the follow-up.

    More below the fold.
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  • New posters

    More from the First Interworld War. One is an updated version of my very first Interworld War poster. The second has the tagline “See Action Now … Join the Rocket Service.”

    My reasoning, and the actual posters, below the fold.

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  • The Appeal of Apocalypse

    What is so seductive about the end of the world?

    Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of the dice. Preachers orate, as they always have, of the coming of hellfire. Books like Left Behind are runaway best-sellers.

    Why is it that we are drawn to the end of the world? More below the fold.

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  • Why I’m a Technophile

    For you to understand this post, there are two things about myself I should tell you — they’re already well-known to any of my friends:

    1. I drink a lot of Coke.
    2. I have catastrophically bad eyesight.

    More below the fold.

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  • Are you safer?

    In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things that are true or good. We are safer, Mr. Cohen asserts, and we should be willing to say or hear this.

    Problem is, he’s flat out wrong. More below the fold.

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  • Ubi Dubium

    There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi libertas”, or, “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”)

  • More from the First Interworld War

    Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

    As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

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    Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

    As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

    (more…)

  • Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

    Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the strict timetables that led to his veto of the previous ones.

    I make no secret of the fact that I fall on the political left and that I believe this Administration is, very likely, the Very Worst Ever. I think it’s time to end this war and to begin healing the massive wounds that have been dealt to our prestige abroad, our civil liberties at home, and indeed the very soul of our democracy. I would support, without reservation, a move to impeach this President for abuse of his office and betrayal of the American people and, worse, the betrayal of core American principles that have made this nation a beacon of hope for humanity.

    So naturally enough, the blogs I read and the people I pay attention to have been in a furor over the recent decision by the Democratic Party leadership. Outraged, and shocked, and hurt, these commentators lament that the Democrats “caved in” to the President and handed him his first legislative victory since November. It will be taken, they say, as a sign of weakness. I felt the same visceral revulsion, the same sense of abandonment, when I realized that the timetable-stripped bill was the one that would reach the President’s desk. After that mind-blowing adrenaline high of sweeping Congress, of finally getting real oversight going, this did seem like a crash back to the dark depths of the Bush supremacy, circa 2004. I did feel that the leadership let me down.

    And yet…
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  • More propaganda

    from a war that was never fought. 🙂 I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model. 🙂

    That You May Breathe Free